Friday, September 19, 2008

Business Data Catalog (BDC) is a feature of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server ( MOSS 2007) which provides a mechanism to bring and display business data on SharePoint. BDC is simple yet powerful to use because of its no-code solution.

Power of BDC

Consider this, there is a web-service (or database) which exposes your Line of Business (LOB) data and you want to see the data on SharePoint. This can be done by writing a custom web-part. You will need a developer to write that custom web-part. Now assume the web-service requires credentials based authentication. Hopefully the developer can still handle that. If the web-service requires unique credentials for each SharePoint user, you will require a smart developer. What about you want to search the data fetched by the web-part ?

BDC's goal is to enable you to surface business data (some of the aspects described above) in Office SharePoint Server 2007 with minimal coding effort. BDC requires one to write [n1] XML based metadata.

BDC Web Part - Adventure Works Sample

MOSS 2007 comes with five Business Data Web Parts [r3] which can display a list of entity instances, display details of an entity instance, display list of related entity instances, display a list of actions associated with an entity and create a Business Data item.

In this sample, a list of entity instances are displayed using Business Data List (BDL) with Adventure Works [r4] database as LOB.

Figure - Model for Adventure Works uploaded.At this step the BDC application definition for adventure works is uploaded.

Step 4 : Add BDL for AdventureWorks products.- Goto your site (MySite)- Click on Site Actions > Edit Page- Choose to add a new Web Part

- Select Business Data List and Click OK- A Business Data List will appear within the "Add a web part" block- Click on "Open the tool pane"- A Business Data List tool bar will open on the right side- Click on the picker button and choose "Product"

- Click OK in BDL pane- Exit the edit mode

- In the search criteria, enter your criteria where you will get all the products associated with the criteria.

Limitation of BDC

BDC only allows read functionality on business data. That means BDC does not support CUD (Create, Update, Delete) on business entities.

BDC metadata XML is tough to understand. If one is not using tools, model is hard to manage and will not necessarily qualify as "no code" solution.